


Cracks Across The Sky

by boxparade



Series: Nightmares [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Developing Relationship, F/F, Gen, Gen? Sort of?, Nightmares, PTSD, Pre-Slash, Storms, Thunder and Lightning, idk - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-08
Updated: 2012-06-08
Packaged: 2017-11-07 06:54:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/428181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all have nightmares. It's a basic requirement for joining the team.</p><p>Natasha, at least, has learned to handle hers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cracks Across The Sky

Natasha’s eyes snap open to the crackle of thunder, and a flash of colorless lightning in the dark. For a moment, the rumbling sounds like fire, like bullets, like buildings crumbling down around her and like bones cracking in her chest.

But it’s not. It’s just thunder. It would serve her well to remember that.

Her fingers slip underneath the edge of the mattress, where she keeps a knife always, and she forces her breathing even while she listens for any disturbance besides the raging storm outside. Once she’s determined that her room is as empty as it was when she went to sleep, she pulls her hand back from the edge of the knife and slips out of bed on silent feet.

Her heartbeat is still faster than usual, and it hurts her chest to keep her breathing slow, steady, and silent.

Since she started staying in the Avengers tower, she’s been less and less careful with how, when, and where she sleeps. It’s a mistake, and she knows this, but Clint continually assures her that they’re safer here than they were in Budapest, or anywhere they’ve been on missions over the years. With Stark’s security system and JARVIS, they’re probably safer than they would be at SHIELD.

But it’s not as if Clint doesn’t have nightmares, either. Or Stark. Hell, Stark probably designed all these security measures because of his nightmares. Her paranoia, despite Clint’s reassurances, is well-founded in pure, Pavlovian conditioning. Forget to trap the door, get shot. Sleep without a weapon close at hand, get shot. Sleep for too long, get shot. Sleep too soundly, get shot. Hell, half the time, sleeping at all was a bad idea.

No matter how safe they are here, Natasha can’t shake the worry that threads deep through her core. It’s what’s kept her alive so far, and she’s not going to willfully abandon it just because a billionaire with an ego tells everyone his security system is the best in the world—better than SHIELD’s.

She tries to shake the memories from her mind, instead focusing on the here and now. She long ago learned to stop feeling guilty about having nightmares—it didn’t grant her any pardons, and besides, being mentally damaged beyond help is a recruitment requirement for the Avengers Initiative. Clint called it passing the Paper Bag test. The one time he’d actually tried it out, everyone was having a quiet breakfast. Thor’s hammer went flying, and hit Clint through a wall because every other person in the room was on the floor, looking for the source of the gunshot.

That’s about the time that the kitchen stopped being stocked with any kind of bag—it was hard-edged tupperware only, now.

Natasha had hoped to just go back to bed, as she usually does, but she doesn’t think she’ll manage anything but a fitful sleep, and that doesn’t seem at all appealing right now. The imagined scent of charred flesh floods her senses, just for a moment, but she closes her eyes and breathes, and soon the smell of falling rain and the flash of lightning and the rumble of thunder all pull her back to reality.

She throws on her black silk robe over her sleep shorts and tank. It’s a gift from Stark, and while she never openly admits it, she loves the damn thing. She has a reason to use it, too, now that she’s stopped sleeping in uniform, ready to jump into a fight with a moment’s notice.

Without remembering to actively do so, she pads through the dark halls toward the kitchen, hoping to settle her stomach with warm milk, or a cup of Bruce’s calming foreign tea. If she really needs it (and she keeps telling herself that she doesn’t) she can always dip into Stark’s liquor stash. He thinks he hid it so well, putting it in the kitchen, behind the false wall of the cabinet where they store the broken toasters for when Stark goes on one of his late-night benders and tries to fix the entire world. It was usually safer to have him trying to fix a bunch of useless toasters that they didn’t need, rather than trying to ‘fix’ the microwave while it was in perfect working order. Clint still bitches about the burns he got when his leftover pizza exploded.

When she reaches the kitchen, she glances at the cabinet, recalling the innocuous bolt in the cabinet wall that actually serves as a button to the liquor (Bruce affectionally called it the Booze Button, once, after the first time he’d found the thing). But no, not tonight. She’s doing alright, and she’d hate to think what the others would think of her, finding her drinking alone at three in the morning.

She turns toward the fridge, but stops mid-turn, staring at the center island that usually serves as their table more often than the real table, and she quickly catalogues the scene, angry at herself for not catching it sooner. Coffee mug in the center of the table, half-filled, with the coffee still steaming. Coffeemaker on the counter, drained to the dregs but unwashed, light still on to indicate it was heating the empty pot. High-top chair on the end pulled out slightly, on an angle. Last morning’s newspaper, unfolded and then refolded to the comics section, laid out on the table near the cup.

She moves toward the chair, placing her fingers against the seat, and it’s warm. Someone was here, then, and recently.

Natasha immediately turns so her back isn’t to the door, and tries to step as carefully as possible to the knife rack against the back wall, reaching behind herself while using her body to block view of her hands. She’s just picked out which of the knives in the rack is likely to be most suited for throwing when she abruptly realizes that this is, in all likelihood, unnecessary.

She’s in the Avengers tower. Assassins don’t just walk past the most difficult security system in the world just to make a pot of coffee and take a seat while they read the paper at three in the morning. In fact, the only people who have coffee at three am and read the newspaper are people who live here.

She carefully slides the knife back into the rack, steps away from the counter, and forces herself to breathe normally. She’s just jumpy because of the nightmares; nothing else. There’s no reason to be as cautious as she is right now. No reason at all.

Natasha sighs and finally opens the fridge to take out the milk and pour herself a mug. The thunder rages on outside, rumbling through the floor and walls and countertops and through her bones, and she shivers and tucks her robe closer around herself. She wonders, briefly, if Thor sleeps well in this weather, being a god of thunder and whatnot. She never does.

The microwave beeps loudly and startles her enough to jump a little and turn, staring at the lit-up, meshed window. She shouldn’t be so skittish. It’s just the storm; it’ll pass, she tells herself. The sound of thunder will fade, as will the sound of machine gun fire, and the sound of children screaming inside of burning buildings, and the sound of the blood rushing through her ears when she comes _this close_ to yet another almost fatal wound. It will fade.

She’s careful not to touch anything but the handle when she takes the mug from the turntable, and she blows over the smooth surface to cool it down before padding into the main room, sitting gingerly on the arm of the chair closest to the windows. The panes of glass reach from floor to ceiling, across the entire length of the room. Whenever lightning crackles through the sky, it lights up the whole room with a bright flash, like a camera, or a grenade.

She waits a minute before sipping at her milk, and curls in on herself when the warmth slides down her throat and settles in her core. She’d forgotten how comforting it was, sipping warm milk when she couldn’t sleep. She doesn’t know where she learned about it—so much about her past is uncertain—but she likes to pretend, sometimes, that it was her mother. Or a sister, if she’d had any. Some family member, warming up mugs of milk in the middle of the night, speaking in low voices and quelling all her childish fears.

But none of these imagined memories are real, she knows. They’re things she’s seen on TV, or things other people have told her, that she implemented into her own mind to try to fill the void that’s there. Her entire memory is SHIELD, training to be the perfect fighter, the perfect actor, the perfect infiltration specialist. Since childhood, there’s been nothing but training, and killing. Somehow, she doesn’t think that kind of life would lend itself to fuzzy moments with mugs of warm milk and stories about thunder being little more than bowling pins.

It’s not the kind of memory someone like her has. It’s too…normal. Domestic, even. And while a part of her wishes that she had had that kind of life, she mostly accepts the fact that this wasn’t her life, and will never be her life. Her work with SHIELD is too important—too big a part of her. She would never sacrifice a single part of that for the kind of childhood memories she imagines most people would have. People like Pepper.

And isn’t that a strange thought? She doesn’t doubt for a second that Miss Potts has these kinds of memories—real memories, anyway. Her life may take an extraordinary twist now and then, because being Stark’s PA for so long could never be described as easy. But of everyone that Natasha knows, Pepper is probably the only one that grew up in a somewhat normal family, with a somewhat normal childhood.

It’s probably why she’s so steady. Natasha never quite knew how she could handle Stark so well, when even Natasha started grinding her teeth after spending too long in the same room as him. It’s probably because of that difference that Pepper is the only one of the Avengers that isn’t damaged in some irreparable way. She’s an honorary member for the way she manages Tony, joining Jane, Darcy, Sif and the warriors three, Rhodey when he isn’t being an ass, and Coulson before—

Natasha redirects her thoughts back around to the here and now, with rapidly cooling milk cradled in her hands, and lightning painting the sky, flushing out all the darkest corners of the city with light and rain. She wonders if Pepper likes thunderstorms—and then promptly wonders why it is that she’s so concerned with Miss Potts.

Natasha has never bothered with relationships. Except for her deal with Clint, which they’d dropped when they both joined the Avengers, she’d never found the point. She didn’t have time to try her hand at honest-to-god dating, with dinner and movies and whatever else couples did. Her job demanded too much of her for that, and so the only arrangement possible had been with Clint, when they were both sent off to some far-corner of the earth, and they both understood the time for play and the time for work. Especially when her work was so high-clearance that dating a civilian would’ve meant using a fake name.

But that had all been before the Avengers. Things are—as Natasha is slowly starting to notice—different now. She doesn’t move around so much. They don’t deal with as many delicate jobs, requiring months of backstory and weeks of infiltration. Trying to go undercover with a self-proclaimed ‘genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist’ in a shiny metal suit, the poster boy for the American WWII effort, a god of thunder incapable of speaking at a normal decibel level, and a giant green rage monster—the idea is downright laughable. She thinks they’ll be sticking to the stop-the-bad-guys type of jobs.

She could, theoretically, try dating now. Of course, she would never consider anyone without at least basic clearance, and after the last time Stark had tried to get into her pants, she had started losing hope in the male sex entirely, but—well, perhaps that’s why Pepper came to mind.

Natasha had thought there’d been…something. When she was with Stark Industries (or pretending to be, at least), Pepper had always seemed to hold her gaze a moment longer than necessary. But Natasha had never considered it because shortly thereafter, Pepper had started dating Tony for however long that lasted (it was most likely Stark’s personal record) and then it had fallen apart amicably enough, but the whole thing consisted of way too many complications, and that wasn’t something Natasha was willing to touch with a ten foot pole.

And now—well, now, Natasha is staring out at the lightning, listening to the dull roar of thunder, wondering if a soft touch in the middle of the night would be enough to draw her back from the roar of gunshots, pools of blood soaking into dirt floors, fires chemically engineered to burn so hot for so long that only ash remained. If a murmur of a familiar voice could overpower the screams and the hiss of bullets. If the simple warmth of another person close at her back could stem the icy chill that overcame her every time she was back in Moscow, Reykjavik, or Novosibirsk.

She thinks, _probably not._

She thinks, _maybe._

She thinks, _it couldn’t hurt._

She finds that, for the first time in a long time, she’s willing to try.


End file.
